US states celebrating the Confederacy
Ten
US states have state holidays that celebrate the Confederacy. They include nearly all the
states that formed the Confederacy in 1861 and fought to perpetuate slavery, plus one (Kentucky)
in which the unionists triumphed then and prevented secession.
It is a mistake to take one negative moral judgment of a person as erasing all good that perse
did. We should judge a person by the magnitudes of the good and the bad.
Any individual who owned slaves or supported the Confederacy did wrong that way, but each such
individual did other things too. In most cases those other things were of no special
importance, so they don't change our conclusions. But there are exceptions. In rare cases, a
person's other activities have been such great contributions to humanity as to justify our
admiring that person despite per involvement with slavery (though we should criticize
that anyway).
A holiday that explicitly celebrates the Confederacy or its leaders is a much simpler moral
subject than a real human being's life. Such a holiday stands only for the Confederacy and what
that stood for: slavery and bigotry, with disloyalty as sauce. Those holidays deserve pure and
simple condemnation.
A few states celebrate a conjoined holiday, "Martin Luther King / Robert E Lee Day". They
juxtapose commemoration of racism with commemoration of the movement against racism. I am not
sure what to think of them, but I think they are too soft on slavery.
It is ironic that the article linked to above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black"
but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither
one.) I denounce bigotry, and usually I will not link to articles
that practice it, but I make some exceptions. I think the article linked to above is
interesting enough to justify an exception. But when I make a such exception, I rebuke the
symbolic bigotry also.